This is not a bug because it is not supposed to work. However, if older GDAL could find some data from such plain json file and 2.x does not then there has perhaps happened some undocumented regression. What does your old GDAL report with

It is a ESRI json variant. The file comes from an ArcGIS REST server. If I add dummy geometry fields with each record, gdal 2.x also parses fine. (Will attach the modified json. The output you requested is given below).